Jackie Chan

A childhood of hard training

Jackie Chan was sent as a young boy to the China Drama Academy, a Peking Opera school in Hong Kong run by Master Yu Jim-yuen. Students trained for long hours in acrobatics, martial arts, singing and acting.

Chan became one of the Seven Little Fortunes, a performing group made of the school's best students. Several of his classmates, including Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao, later became major action stars and his frequent partners.

Starting at the bottom

Chan entered the film business as an extra and a stuntman. In the early 1970s he worked on Bruce Lee films, including Fist of Fury (1972), where he doubled for a villain and took a huge flying fall during the final fight.

Those years taught him how fights are filmed: where to put the camera, how to sell a hit and how to make a dangerous fall look effortless. He later used that knowledge to direct and design the action in his own films.

Comedy plus kung fu

Chan's big idea was to mix martial arts with comedy. Instead of a cold, unbeatable hero, he played a regular guy who gets hurt, panics and uses chairs, ladders and anything else nearby to survive. Audiences loved it, and the outtakes shown over the end credits of his films, revealing stunts that went wrong, became a trademark.

He built his own stunt team to work with him, and he became famous for doing his own dangerous stunts long after most stars handed them to doubles.

Records and honors

For Chinese Zodiac (2012), Guinness World Records recognised Chan for the most stunts performed by a living actor and for the most credits in one movie, with jobs that included actor, director, writer, producer and stunt coordinator.

He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2002 and an honorary Academy Award in 2016. In 2025 the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland gave him its career achievement award.

How he plans a fight

Chan is known for designing action like a dance. Each fight is broken into short moves, rehearsed over and over, then filmed from angles that show the full body so the audience can see the action is real.

Props are part of the choreography. A chair, a ladder or a jacket can become a shield, a weapon or a joke, and that playful use of everyday objects is now copied in action films around the world.

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